Takeda Adds Medicinal Chemistry Heft To NYC Research Partnership

Joint research effort by three New York-based academic research organizations seeks to expedite translation of basic biomedical research into innovative therapies. Initial focus is on small molecules, but the plan is to branch out eventually into monoclonal antibodies and molecular imaging agents, as well.

With a personnel contribution from Japan’s Takeda Pharmaceutical Co. Ltd., three New York-based academic research institutions will team up to create the Tri-Institutional Therapeutics Discovery Institute (Tri-I TDI), a non-profit organization that will seek to expedite advancement of basic biomedical research into innovative therapies and treatments across a broad spectrum of therapeutic areas.

Announced Oct. 1 in New York City, the collaboration will bring together under one roof researchers from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Rockefeller University and Cornell University’s Weill Cornell Medical College. The medicinal chemistry headquarters for Tri-I TDI will be Weill Cornell’s state-of-the-art Belfer Research Building, slated to open next January.

This is hardly the first time these three institutions have come together for a joint research initiative. In 2011, each was among seven New York research institutes electing to partner with Pfizer Inc. in an initiative to apply open innovation toward the development of biologic therapies across all therapeutic areas [See Deal]. In addition, each institution has pursued its own tech-transfer deals with private industry over the years.

The institute begins its work with $20 million in philanthropic funding. It has received a $15 million grant from Lewis and Ali Sanders and $5 million from Howard and Abby Milstein. In addition, the three institutions will make equal contributions to an operating budget, while Takeda’s initial investment will be in the form of medicinal chemists based at the institute.

At Elsevier Business Intelligence’s PSA: The Pharmaceutical Strategy Conference last month in New York, Takeda Chief Medical and Scientific Officer Tachi Yamada hinted about the announcement of this collaboration.

“How does innovation occur in academia,” he asked the conference. “I was an academic for 20 years. And it’s two scientists working side-by-side [bringing] complementary skills and work together. And what [the industry has] evolved to is the point where we have a purchaser and a seller. We don’t have collaborators anymore.”

“There is another way, and we’re really exploring this,” Yamada continued. “In a week or so, we’re doing very much this kind of collaboration with a group of critical academics. But the idea is not that we would put a lot of money into this, but we put people into this. And our people are very different from the academics at work. Our people have strength in chemistry and preclinical development, in regulatory issues and processes and so forth. And academia brings great strength in biology and technology platforms and such. The idea is to have true collaboration, rather than having a financial relationship.”

Carl Nathan, chairman of Weill Cornell’s department of microbiology and immunology, said Takeda’s participation will be unique, in that the personnel it lends to the effort will perform medicinal chemistry and take those processes much farther along than would be possible at the academic level, but without any guarantee of an economic benefit to the Japanese pharma.

“The intellectual property gets assigned back to the institution whose faculty originated the particular project or more than one institution if it’s a collaborative project,” Nathan explained in an interview. “In terms of IP rights, what Takeda gets is the right of first look and first offer, but there’s no obligation to partner with them downstream.”

Options For Therapeutic Areas, Potential Partners

The whole idea of the institute is very open. Its work can move into any area in which a faculty member from one of the three institutions comes up with a workable idea, and resulting IP can be out-licensed to any private-sector partner. While all three organizations perform research in oncology, Nathan said the projects also could be in areas such as neuroscience, neurodegeneration, cardiovascular, metabolic, pulmonary, immunology and autoimmune disease, and infectious disease.

“What we’re going to look for is projects that look tractable, that look like they could succeed and if they do, will answer a question about a basic biological process that influences disease or health,” he said. “There’s no effort to try to impose a particular disease emphasis or to avoid a particular emphasis. It all depends on the particular projects that come forward.”

The chiefs of the three research organizations will comprise the initial board of directors, with the authority to appoint other board members. The board will select a scientific advisory board, which will help decide which faculty projects the institute will move forward with.

Beyond the $20 million in philanthropic money and the operating budget, Nathan said the institute will be open to a broad variety of ways to fund its work. The hope, of course, is for tech transfer deals that will offer future revenue streams based on licensing fees and royalties. But the institute also will consider venture capital investment, likely to be on a project-development basis, he said. And while Takeda will have no specific rights to programs, it’s only natural to assume the firm will have an inside track on those programs it favors.

“When they do make an offer, they’ll know a lot about a project because they will have been intimately involved in it since its birth or shortly after,” Nathan said. “They’ll be able to make a much more informed judgment than often is the case even when doing one’s best due diligence on an IP portfolio.”

“They’ll also have the opportunity to assure that the chemical matter and the proof-of-concept are as good as they can be because they’ll be doing it and will have the opportunity to contribute even more resources if they wish, for projects they’re particularly interested in,” he added. “I think that will increase their efficiency of success in licensing opportunities. It also will increase our efficiency because we’ll be marketing intellectual property that is much more mature and where the quality of the chemical material is much higher and proof-of-concept is more secure as a result.”

Licensing will be done by the institution that originated the specific IP. In instances where the IP is held jointly by two or all three of the institutions – a situation that is anticipated to occur frequently – interinstitutional agreements will be worked out with partners, Nathan said.

Weill Cornell entered an early-stage research collaboration with Sanofi in 2011 intended to identify new candidates for latent and resistant forms of tuberculosis (Also see "Pharma Continues Its March To Academia, as Sanofi, UCB Strike Deals" - Pink Sheet, 29 Jun, 2011.). Sloan-Kettering was one of a group of academic institutions agreeing in 2012 to participate in Bristol-Myers Squibb Co.’s Immuno-Oncology Network, to discover and develop immunological approaches to killing cancer cells [See Deal]. Rockefeller licensed an anti-amyloid beta antibody for Alzheimer’s disease to Sanofi in 2009 [See Deal].